Saturday, November 6, 2010

Bread prices could go as high as $23 a loaf by 2020
due to the effects of inflation

﻿

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
November 6, 2010

﻿﻿

Within a decade, a loaf of wheat bread may cost $23 in a grocery store in the United States, and a 32-oz package of sugar might run $62. A 64-oz container of Minute Maid Orange Juice, meanwhile, could set you back $45.71. This is all according to a new report released Friday by the National Inflation Association which warns consumers about the coming wave of food price inflation that’s about to strike the western world.

“For every economic problem the U.S. government tries to solve, it always creates two or three much larger catastrophes in the process,” said Adams. “Just like we predicted this past December, the U.S. dollar index bounced in early 2010 and has been in free-fall ever since. Bernanke’s QE2 will likely accelerate this free-fall into a complete U.S. dollar rout.”

The upshot of a falling dollar will mean rampant price inflation on the basic goods and services that Americans depend on to survive. Food in particular is likely to be hit hard by price inflation within the decade.

It offers statements like this: “NIA is confident that the upcoming monetization of our debt will send nearly all agricultural commodities soaring to new all time inflation adjusted highs.”

The Federal Reserve, of course, is currently engaged in the most massive money counterfeiting operation the world has ever witnessed. And it seems determined to keep printing money until all the dollars the rest of us hold are near-worthless.

Even the UN sees rising food prices
It’s not just the NIA that sees a future with much higher food prices, by the way: Both the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development as well as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization also predict rising food prices (although not to the same prices as the NIA).

This is based on the trend of rising energy prices which directly translate into higher costs for farming, harvesting, transporting and processing foods. Catch the details on that story at http://www.naturalnews.com/029999_f…

(Many of those predictions have already come true, by the way!)
Make no mistake: Food prices are on the rise. And with the Fed watering down the dollar thanks to its insane money counterfeiting policies, the U.S. is headed into a price inflation / dollar deflation scenario that mean you will have to spent a lot more dollars to buy the same food in 2015 as you did in 2010. (If the dollar even exists in 2015, that is…)

What does this all mean to you and me? As the spring comes back in a few months, it might be a good time to start thinking about growing a little garden for yourself. We’ll be covering this story in much more detail in the spring, including details on where to get heirloom seeds, how to practice “preparedness” gardening (or “gardening when it counts”) and other similar topics.

In the mean time, stay tuned to NaturalNews for tips and strategies on how to do more with less in uncertain times.

The United Nations Human Rights Council, a conclave of 47 nations that includes such notorious human rights violators as China, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia, met in Geneva on Friday, to question the United States about its human rights failings.

It heard, among other things, that the U.S. discriminates against Muslims, that its police are barbaric and that it has been holding political prisoners behind bars for years.

Russia urged the U.S. to abolish the death penalty. Cuba and Iran called on Washington to close Guantanamo prison and investigate alleged torture by its troops abroad. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, told the U.S. it must better promote religious tolerance. Mexico complained that racial profiling had become a common practice in some U.S. states.

Some of these allegations, and many more, come from Americans themselves — especially from a stridently critical network of U.S. organizations whose input dominates the U.N. digest of submissions from “civil society” that are part of the council’s background reading.

The Federal Reserve is going back to Jekyll Island to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the infamous 1910 Jekyll Island meeting that spawned the draft legislation that would ultimately create the U.S. Federal Reserve.

In November 1910, the original gathering at Jekyll Island included U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and many representatives from the upper crust of the U.S. banking establishment. That meeting was held in an environment of absolute and total secrecy. 100 years later, Federal Reserve bureaucrats will return to Jekyll Island once again to "celebrate" the history and the future of the Federal Reserve.

BIN LADEN NEVER MENTIONED IN McCHRYSTAL REPORT OR OBAMA SPEECH“HUNT FOR BIN LADEN” A NATIONAL SHAMEBy Gordon Duff/STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Conservative commentator, former Marine Colonel Bob Pappas has been saying for years that bin Laden died at Tora Bora and that Senator Kerry’s claim that bin Laden escaped with Bush help was a lie. Now we know that Pappas was correct. The embarrassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific. He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn’t nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.

However, since we lost a couple of hundred of our top special operations forces hunting for bin Laden after we knew he was dead, is someone going to answer for this with some jail time? Since we spent 200 million dollars on “special ops” looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that? Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that? Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US? This is a criminal act if there ever was one.

In 66 pages, General Stanley McChrystal never mentions Osama bin Laden. Everything is “Mullah Omar”now. In his talk at West Point, President Obama never mentioned Osama bin Laden. Col. Pappas makes it clear, Vice President Cheney let it “out of the bag” long ago. Bin Laden was killed by American troops many many years ago.

America knew Osama bin Laden died December 13, 2001. After that, his use was hardly one to unite America but rather one to divide, scam and play games. With bin Laden gone, we could have started legitimate nation building in Afghanistan instead of the eternal insurgency that we invented ourselves.
Without our ill informed policies, we could have had a brought diplomatic solution in 2002 in Afghanistan, the one we are ignoring now, and spent money rebuilding the country, 5 cents on the dollar compared to what we are spending fighting a war against an enemy we ourselves recruited thru ignorance.

The bin Laden scam is one of the most shameful acts ever perpetrated against the American people. We don’t even know if he really was an enemy, certainly he was never the person that Bush and Cheney said. In fact, the Bush and bin Laden families were always close friends and had been for many years.

What kind of man was Osama bin Laden? This one time American ally against Russia, son of a wealthy Saudi family, went to Afghanistan to help them fight for their freedom. America saw him as a great hero then. Transcripts of the real bin Laden show him to be much more moderate than we claim, angry at Israel and the US government but showing no anger toward Americans and never making the kind of theats claimed. All of this is public record for any with the will to learn.

How much of America’s tragedy is tied with these two children of the rich, children of families long joined thru money and friendship, the Bush and bin Laden clans.

One son died in remote mountains, another lives in a Dallas suburb hoping nobody is sent after him. One is a combat veteran, one never took a strong stand unless done from safety and comfort. Islam once saw bin Laden as a great leader. Now he is mostly forgotten.
What has America decided about Bush?

We know this: Bin Laden always denied any ties to 9/11 and, in fact, has never been charged in relation to 9/11. He not only denied involvement, but had done so, while alive, 4 times and had vigorously condemned those who were involved in the attack.

This is on the public record, public in every free country except ours. We, instead, showed films made by paid actors, made up to look somewhat similar to bin Laden, actors who contradicted bin Ladens very public statements, actors pretending to be bin Laden long after bin Laden’s death.

These were done to help justify spending, repressive laws, torture and simple thievery.
For years, we attacked the government of Pakistan for not hunting down someone everyone knew was dead. Bin Laden’s death hit the newspapers in Pakistan on December 15, 2001. How do you think our ally felt when they were continually berated for failing to hunt down and turn over someone who didn’t exist?
What do you think this did for American credibility in Pakistan and thru the Islamic world? Were we seen as criminals, liars or simply fools? Which one is best?
This is also treason.

How does the death of bin Laden and the defeat and dismemberment of Al Qaeda impact the intelligence assessments, partially based on, not only bin Laden but Al Qaeda activity in Iraq that,not only never happened but was now known to have been unable to happen?

How many “Pentagon Pundits,” the retired officers who sold their honor to send us to war for what is now known to be domestic political dirty tricks and not national security are culpable in these crimes?
I don’t always agree with Col. Pappas on things. I believe his politics overrule his judgement at times. However, we totally agree on bin Laden, simply disagree with what it means. To me lying and sending men to their deaths based on lies is treason.

Falsifying military intelligence and spending billions on unnecessary military operations for political reasons is an abomination. Consider this, giving billions in contracts to GOP friends who fill campaign coffers, and doing so based on falsified intelligence is insane. This was done for years.

We spent 8 years chasing a dead man, spending billions, sending FBI agents, the CIA, Navy Seals, Marine Force Recon, Special Forces, many to their deaths, as part of a political campaign to justify running American into debt, enriching a pack of political cronies and war profiteers and to puff up a pack of Pentagon peacocks and their White house draft dodging bosses.
How many laws were pushed thru because of a dead man?
How many hundreds were tortured to find a dead man?
How many hundreds died looking for a dead man?
How many billions were spent looking for a dead man?

Every time Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld stood before troops and talked about hunting down the dead bin Laden, it was a dishonor. Lying to men and women who put their lives on the line is not a joke.
Who is going to answer to the families of those who died for the politics and profit tied to the Hunt for Bin Laden?

Friday, November 5, 2010

A friend sent me this You Tube video in my email today. After watching it, I felt impelled to post it in hopes that by showing the possibility of its content, we may expose the very real possibility that it could come true.

I don't know if the episodes shown in this video were done as a code to others who are initiated in the Elite groups attempting to bring about a New World Order, or pure coincidence.... That will be for you to decide.

Will there be a false flag attack on 11/06/2010? We'll know by tomorrow.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

The Federal Reserve is entering uncharted territory with this second phase of quantitative easing. The public may or may not be aware that the Fed has already embarked on quantitative easing (QE1) and has grown their balance sheet by $1.7 trillion (that’s $1,700,000,000,000) by exchanging U.S. Treasuries for questionable assets including a shopping mall in Oklahoma.

It is obvious that the Fed is betting on the public being unaware of this action to continue on their unabashed shadow bailout of the banking industry. Some think that this will somehow cause residential real estate prices to boom. Yet this flies directly in the face of a middle class that is quickly seeing their nominal income decrease. How will they support higher home prices? It doesn’t compute but what is certain is the demise of the U.S. dollar is already happening.Read More

November 3rd, 2010 9:08 pm | by Marc GallagherLibertymaven.com
Well, to be quite fair Ron Paul said they talked about introducing a bill to end or audit the Fed on their first day in office together. Here is the entire long and excellent interview with David Asman on Fox Business channel.

The subcommittee’s jurisdiction includes domestic monetary policy, and agencies which directly or indirectly affect domestic monetary policy, multilateral development lending institutions such as the World Bank, coins and currency including operations of the Bureau of the Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and international trade and finance including all matters pertaining to the International Monetary Fund and the Export-Import Bank.I don’t think there could be a more perfect subcommittee for Ron Paul.
Later in the interview Judge Napolitano joins the discussion. Check it out below.

Having seen a shift in the balance of power, with the Republican Party now dominating the House with 60 members, and several States accross the Country, it is even more likely that the Obama/Bernanke Printing Press will continue to push out more fiat currency - courtesy of the Federal Reserve.

Most people watching the elections seem to be of the opinion that there will be some recuperation of the economy now that there is once again a moderately strong grip in Washington by the Republican party, however, the markets seemed to have anticipated the shift that was to come as far back as a couple weeks ago, and the dollar continues to suffer.

What seems to be overlooked however, is the fact that the Fed will more than likely seize upon a "gridlock" in congress as an opportunity to take control over the economy. "Helicopter" Bernanke now feels it will be up to him and the Fed to take the helm of the economic ship, so to speak, due to the fact that a more conservative stance will now control the insanity of Washington's last few years of out of control spending.

The irony of the republican re-emergence and message of fiscal responsibility is that, instead of bringing an end to the insanity, the Federal Reserve will be even more intent on printing more money since the President and his democrat allies will no longer be able use Congress as an ATM for more bailouts and stimuluses for their Wall Street Cronies.

"The Federal Reserve has a particular obligation to help promote increased employment and sustain price stability,.........Steps taken this week should help us fulfill that obligation."

Of course, this printing of fiat currency from thin air will only succeed in devaluating the dollar further, and excelerate the inevitable price hikes in food, products and services which are already digging into consumers pockets as I write.

None of us should forget the fact that since the beginning of the crisis in late 2007 and up to now, Washington has printed and dumped trillions of so-called "Stimulus" and "Bailout" dollars into the economy, and the results have been thousands of businesses closing down, hundreds of thousands of house forclosures, about 44 million Americans now on foodstamps, an unemployment rate hovering at around 9.6% (15 million), and a total deficit of around 200 trillion dollars!

It seems more likely that Bernanke, (a puppet of the Global Regime of Elitists hell-bent on bringing in a world currency), is following orders from above to bring America to it's knees in order to force a total financial transformation of our monetary system. Similar moves are currently taking place in several other industrialized nations as well, i.e, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Greece and others.

Maurice Strong- Former UN Secretary General -once stated that the United Nations and its NGO affiliates would have to bring about an economic "collapse" to any industrialized nations that would be unwilling to sign agreements to reduce carbon emissions:

“What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment? Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?

“The group’s conclusions is ‘no.’ The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

It is apparent that this move by the Fed will also help in Strong's vision of collapsing our nation as well.

It is imperative that Americans now push the new Republicans in office to audit the fraudulant Federal Reserve, and abolish it altogether. I believe we can use this request as a true litmus test to define the Republican "Patriots" from the "Pretenders". Those only pretending to be restorers of the Republic can then be rooted out, until the Fed is shut down.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

WASHINGTON -- Under a new concept for Army force generation, all units not locked into a deployment date will become part of a contingency expeditionary force.

These CEF units -- when not responding to global contingencies -- will be expected to "get back to basics" and conduct full-spectrum training, said Maj. Gen. Mark A. Graham, the G-3/5/7 for U.S. Army Forces Command.

"We've had many, many questions on CEF units: what do they do? And how does this CEF thing work?" Graham said Oct. 25 during a readiness panel at the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition.

A CEF white paper was released this week to answer those questions. The FORSCOM Campaign Plan rolled out at the AUSA annual meeting also had several pages about CEF units. And the concept will be further explained in FORSCOM Circular 350-1, scheduled to be released by January, Graham said.

CEF units will be identified within 90 days of returning from theater, according to the white paper. They will go through the same ARFORGEN reset and training cycles as units going back to Afghanistan, but their missions will be elsewhere. The CEF units will perform such missions as:

Graham and Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, the Army's G-3/5/7, also discussed the Army Force Generation Model during the AUSA forum. They were joined by Brig. Gen. Jon Miller, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Reserve Command and Brig. Gen. Timothy Kadavy, deputy director of the Army National Guard.
"If ARFORGEN is done right, it provides the space for us to look toward tomorrow," Bolger said. He explained that it should allow the Army to look beyond a counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan toward other threats, such as force-on-force.

ARFORGEN "can give us some forces that can ... drop off the conveyer belt and check out some other ways we can do business." Bolger mentioned that a CEF brigade at Fort Bliss will be designated to do experimentation and look at future forces.

CEF forces will have more time to train full-spectrum at the National Training Center or at Fort Polk, La., Bolger said. Right now, a brigade combat team of the 82nd Airborne Division is going through the first full-spectrum rotation at Polk's Joint Readiness Training Center, Bolger said.

Training full-spectrum will mean going "back to basics" Graham said, and learning to do tasks that contractors have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said it means "Soldiers turning wrenches again" and doing preventive maintenance in the motor pool.

"Contractors do a lot of things for us down range," Graham said, giving the example of KBR providing meals. He said units will need to cook again at the combat training centers. He said units will have more time to do things like training management.

But the CEF white paper suggests that with a high operations tempo continuing through next year, it may be about 15 months until much of the plan can begin to be implemented. It will begin with units returning from theater and entering the reset pool during the second quarter of fiscal year 2012.

Then the ARFORGEN synchronization board will designate every unit either a deployment expeditionary force or a CEF. The difference between the two, Graham explained, is simply that a DEF unit will receive a "latest arrival date" or LAD for a theater of operation such as Afghanistan.

The DEF force every year consists of one corps, five divisions, 20 brigades, and 90,000 enablers, Graham said, explaining this is known as 1-5-20-90.

The CEF force must also be capable of providing a "surge" capability, he said, which will consist of one corps, four divisions, 10 brigades and 41,000 enablers -- this being known as 1-4-10-41. This surge force will be mostly active-duty, he said, due to its need to deploy on short notice. The surge force will consist of CEF units during their last months in the train/ready pool of the ARFORGEN cycle.

ARFORGEN provides an "unprecedented visibility" of units, Graham said. "We know more now about units -- all the way down to the dog team -- than we ever have before," he said, explaining FORSCOM better knows the state of training and readiness.

"We can see ourselves better and we're able to tell where we need to sharpen the blade a little," Graham said.

He said a 90-K Enabler Study indicated that some small units are out of alignment -- that a number of small units are now separated from their parent headquarters due to the deployment cycle.
"We're now putting the Rubik's Cube back together," Graham said.

"Now what we've got to do is continue to move the cube until the colors are aligned. That's what we're working on today -- to draw the enabling structure back together under the parent units so we can get back in synch. That will take two or three years to do it," he said.

Summit Set for Newly Elected Officials

WALL STREET JOURNAL

BOWLING GREEN, Ky.—Tea-party leaders, cheering as some of their movement's most prominent figures won U.S. Senate seats in Kentucky and Florida, said Tuesday's elections were only the beginning of their quest to transform government.

"Things look good for tonight," said Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group that says it has 2,800 local affiliates around the country. "No one in this movement is stopping today. This is not an endgame. This is just a beginning."

Tea-party victors included Republican Rand Paul, who claimed the Senate seat in Kentucky, and the GOP's Marco Rubio, who defeated former Gov. Charlie Christ and Rep. Kendrick Meek in Florida's three-way race for Senate.

Movement losers included Christine O'Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, whose comments about witchcraft embarrassed some in the movement, and Republican Carl Paladino, who lost his bid for governor of New York.

Early results signaled that despite some losses, the movement was on its way to becoming a major force in Washington and on the national political landscape. Ahead is a chaotic period as the movement's factions compete to set the agenda and influence the ranks of new members of Congress.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

FOXBusiness
A struggling U.S. woman who wrote to President Barack Obama about her financial hardship and received a handwritten response from him saying, "Things will get better!," has had to sell the letter to an autograph dealer, the New York Post reported Monday.

Jennifer Cline, 28, from Monroe, Mich., wrote to Obama describing how she and her husband lost their jobs in 2007. She wrote, "I lost my job, my health benefits and my self-worth in a matter of five days."

The moving letter then detailed how, after being diagnosed with two types of skin cancer, Cline turned her life around -- she signed up for Medicaid, found that her treatment was successful and saw her unemployment benefit extended -- enabling her to go back to college.

She added, "In just a couple of years, we will be in a great spot."

Obama was shown the letter by an aide Jan. 8. He wrote back on a White House-headed card that he signed, "Thanks for the very kind and inspiring letter. I know times are tough, but knowing there are folks out there like you and your husband gives me confidence that things will keep getting better!"

But things did not immediately improve for Cline, who has now agreed to sell the letter to autograph dealer Gary Zimet for $7,000 to help pay off medical bills from her cancer treatment and for a down payment on a house.

Paul Joseph WatsonInfowars.com
November 2, 2010
When even uber-leftist Chris Matthews slams the President for being elitist and distant from the American people, you know that the cult of Obama is finished for good, and that Barry’s political career may not even survive long enough for him to run again in 2012, providing the perfect opportunity for Ron Paul to outstrip a similarly despised group of neo-con Republican candidates and become the people’s President in two years’ time.
Obama can barely half fill a 13,000 capacity arena for a Democratic National Committee rally, while he has avoided supporting Democratic candidates for fear that his surging unpopularity would harm their campaigns.
Obama has become bogged down with polarizing rhetoric about Democrats ‘punishing their enemies’, while embroiling himself in pointless and embarrassing exchanges with hecklers.
Almost half of Democrats have now significantly reduced or abandoned altogether their support for Obama. Likewise, almost half even support the notion of running another Democrat against him in a 2012 primary.Some White House officials are even debating whether to use the 25th amendment to remove Obama from power because he is “mentally incapable of fulfilling the office of president.”
Indeed, the only saving grace for Obama is the fact that the Republican candidates he is likely to face in 2012, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich, have all lost popularity at a similar pace to the President. If Obama were to run against any of these individuals, he would probably still win, such is American’s increasing disdain for the two party monopoly.
That’s why the 2012 race is tailor made for Ron Paul to step up and provide a genuine alternative to fix the trail of destruction that endless cycles of Democrats and Republicans have left. Indeed, by 2012 Obama will be so reviled that Paul would have little problem in defeating him. By far the bigger stumbling block will be securing the Republican primary because the Fox News neo-con media empire will aim all their big guns against Paul as they did in 2008.
Democrats who voted for Obama in 2008 will only be motivated to do so again if Republicans put forward a compromised candidate who can easily be characterized as George W. Bush 2.0. If Ron Paul runs against Obama, huge numbers of Democrats will take a back seat, and some may even switch allegiances, such is the profound sense of betrayal many liberals now feel towards Barry’s completely unfulfilled promises of hope and change.
Similarly, Independents hold far more negative views towards the likes of Palin and Gingrich than they do Ron Paul.The Texan Congressman himself said that running for President in 2012 is “something I think about every single day,” while hinting that a further deterioration of the economy and a dollar collapse could spur him to throw his hat in the ring. Undoubtedly, Paul’s outstanding reputation as a respected fiscal conservative would be a hugely popular platform on which to build his campaign.Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
Ron Paul has no better chance to become President than in 2012 and we urge him to accept the challenge and provide millions of Americans with genuine hope that the country can still be rescued from its current spiral of terminal decline.
—Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

There are multiple watchdogs groups ready to try and prevent voter fraud on Election Day.
The U.S. Department of Justice says it will deploy more than 400 election monitors to 18 states to keep tabs on the electoral process. Their mission is to prevent fraud, intimidation, or voter suppression.
Several states have established their own hotlines, and in New York City voters can even tweet in reports of problems.
Some citizens' groups, like Election Integrity Watch in Minneapolis, plan to deploy their own poll watchers.
"Our mission is to ensure fair and honest elections," said Jeff Davis, a founder of Election Integrity Watch and President of the conservative advocacy group, Minnesota Majority. "Over the course of the last elections here in Minnesota, we have discovered numerous problems, and government officials were reluctant to acknowledge those problems or investigate. We've concluded that it is up to us, we the people, to ensure the integrity of elections."
Just last week authorities in Minnesota charged 47 people with voter fraud from the 2008 election, and Davis believes the actual number is higher this year. They even held a news conference with Ian Hodge, who received an election postal verification card saying he is registered to vote, and listing his polling place. The only problem is that Mr. Hodge is not an American citizen. He's British.
"If people are aware that there are going to be people watching the election process," he says, then "that will maybe dissuade those people who have committed fraudulent voting in the past."
But others fear that such groups can lead to voter intimidation.
Wendy Weiser, of the NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, told Fox News "what we are concerned with is that when there are large scale mobilization around ballot security efforts, they often cross the line and used tactics that have the affect of suppressing legitimate votes. And this has happened time and again and we are worried that this may happen again this time."

Monday, November 1, 2010

→Washington’s Blog
Mervyn King - the governor of the Bank of England - has proposed abolishing fractional reserve banking.
As the BBC noted last week:

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has tonight made a big intervention into the debate on banking reform. In a speech at Buttonwood, New York, he [listed] much more radical proposals.

1. Forcing the riskiest banks to hold capital "several times the magnitude" of requirements at present.2. The Volcker rule-style enforced breakup of banks into speculative and non-speculative arms.3. The "Kotlikoff proposal", which forces banks to match each pool of risks with a requisite amount of capital, preventing losses in one spilling over into another.4. Stunningly, Mervyn King imagines the "abolition of fractional reserve banking":

"Eliminating fractional reserve banking explicitly recognises that the pretence that risk-free deposits can be supported by risky assets is alchemy. If there is a need for genuinely safe deposits the only way they can be provided, while ensuring costs and benefits are fully aligned, is to insist such deposits do not co-exist with risky assets."

King does not advocate any of these radical plans - but the fact that he goes out of his way to list them, and to place them on the agenda of the UK's Independent Commission on Banking, means that we are not yet at the end of the debate about long-term reform of the banks.

***

Beyond the technicalities, the fact that a central banker in a G7 country is prepared to imagine such outcomes is itself significant.

You suggest that banks should be forced to conform to the underlying purpose of the 1844 Bank Reform Act. You might be aware that I have said publicly that I think ideas in this spirit - such as those advocated by John Kay - certainly merit serious consideration in the debate as to how we reform our financial system. I remain sympathetic to these views. But as I said in my previous letter, I do not want to prejudice the outcome of the Banking commission's deliberations. Now the Commission has been set up, I think we all should wait to see its conclusions."

The 1844 Bank Charter Act ('Reform' is a typo) was a piece of legislation that prohibited commercial banks from printing paper notes (£1, £5, £10 and so on). Before this law was passed, banks were permitted to print as many paper notes as they wanted, up to the point where they printed too many and went bankrupt (as everyone cashed in their paper notes at once).

That situation should sound very similar to the situation that we have today - we currently allow commercial banks to 'print' money in the form of digital bank deposits (the numbers in your bank account). In the years up to 2007, the banks 'printed' far too much of this digital money, to the extent that they - and the economy - started to collapse.

The 'underlying purpose' of the 1844 Bank Charter Act was to prevent the commercial banks creating money and to restore that privilege to the state. It had become obvious to the government of the day that if banks were allowed to create money, they would keep creating money up until the point where it destabilized the economy, so they could not be trusted with this responsibility.
So, in plain English, Mervyn King appears to be saying:

"I agree that banks should probably be stopped from creating money, and recommend John Kay (or Laurence Kotlikoff's) proposals. But it's not for me to say - let's leave it to the Banking Commission."

It's very reassuring to know that the top guy at the Bank of England understands the root of the issue and is promoting solutions that would go a long way to addressing it. Both John Kay and Laurence Kotlikoff's proposals would prevent commercial banks from creating money (or 'issuing credit') for their own benefit at the expense of the wider economy and the public.

Ironically, while King is proposing the potential elimination of fractional reserve banking (i.e. a return to 100% reserves), Ben Bernanke has proposed the elimination of all reserve requirements (i.e. requiring no reserves):

The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Spinning the Numbers When Conservatives in Charge: During the year leading up to the 2005-06 mid-term elections, the economy was strong and unemployment never went above 5 percent. That wasn’t how the media reported it. Negative reports and stories spun negatively accounted for 58 percent of the stories (38 out of 65).Spinning the Numbers When Left in Charge: Despite the near 10 percent unemployment throughout the year leading to the 2009-10 elections, positive reports and stories spun positively accounted for 52 percent of the stories (46 out of 88).

Just days before the mid-term elections and jobs remain the major campaign issue. Unemployment stands at 9.6 percent with nearly 15 million people out of work. Gallup’s analysis argues things are even worse, with unemployment hitting 10 percent again – a number voters wouldn’t see until the Friday after the election. As Gallup explained, it’s “up sharply from 9.4% in mid-September and 9.3% at the end of August.” That means heartache and struggle across the United States.

That’s not the story being told this election. What voters are left with are false impressions from the broadcast news shows – that somehow the worst unemployment in 25 years is not that bad. CNBC’s Steve Liesman called it “self-sustaining job growth,” on NBC’s April 2, 2010 “Nightly News.”

That’s also exactly the opposite of how those same networks handled low unemployment during the last mid-term election. Then, with a Republican in the White House, journalists worked hard at undermining the positive news with the possibility that bad things might occur.

In the likely event that Republicans capture control of one or both houses of Congress next week, the new leaders will face a strategic question. Should they pursue the agenda of the Tea Party movement that brought them to power? Or should they try to mollify their party's base with gestures and symbols, without taking its radical ideology too seriously? While they'll never discuss this problem honestly, indications point in the latter direction. That is, the GOP's congressional leadership will feint right while legislating closer to the center.

Earlier this year, President Obama drove U.S.-Israeli relations — to use one of Obama's oft-employed analogies — into a ditch.

Arguably, ties between the two countries were never more strained than last spring when Obama serially insulted the elected leader of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vilified his country, and tried to euchre it into making territorial, political, and other ill-advised concessions to Arabs determined as ever to destroy the Jewish state.

Unfortunately, what the president has in mind for Israel after the election next week will make his previous treatment of the Jewish State look like the good old days.

To be sure, ties between the United States and Israel, far and away America's most important and loyal friend in the Middle East, have improved lately from the nadir to which Obama plunged them since he took office.

That has nothing to do, however, with a change of heart or agenda on the part of the president and his administration.

Rather, it is a reflection of a cynical calculation forced upon the Obama White House by its panicked congressional allies. Already laboring under the backbreaking burden of their association with a president and his agenda that have become huge liabilities, Democrats on Capitol Hill faced wholesale defections of their Jewish constituents and funders if their party's leader persisted in his assault on Israel.

Public letters and private conversations had the desired effect: Barack Obama began treating his Israeli counterpart with a modicum of respect and the optics of a restarted peace process — however short-lived or doomed — helped conjure up an image of a renewed partnership between the two nations.

Make no mistake about it, though: Once the 2010 elections are behind him, it is a safe bet that Obama will revert to form by once again exhibiting an unmistakable and ruthless determination to bend Israel to his will.

Worse yet, he will be able to take advantage of a vehicle for effecting the so-called "two-state solution," no matter how strenuously Israel and its friends in Washington object: The Palestinians will simply unilaterally declare themselves a state and ask for international recognition, and Obama will accede to that request.

A number of the particulars involved in this gambit are unclear at the moment. For example, will the Palestinians announce the borders of their state to be the 1967 cease-fire lines, in which case large Israeli population centers (defiled as "settlements") will be inside a nation that is certain to be, to use Hitler's phrase, judenrein (free of Jews)?

How will the Hamas-stan of Gaza be connected to the currently PLO-run West Bank in a way that will make them "contiguous" without bisecting the Jewish state and ensuring that Hamas does not take over the rest of the so-called "Palestinian authority"?

Also unclear is precisely how Obama will handle the sticky issue of extending U.S. recognition of Palestine. Will he want to parallel Harry Truman's direct and immediate endorsement of the establishment of Israel in 1948? Or will he do it more disingenuously, as former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton speculated in The Wall Street Journal last week, by having the United States abstain from an approving vote by the United Nations Security Council?

The hope behind the latter would be that Team Obama and its partisans will somehow avoid retribution from Israel's friends, both Democrats and others, both here and abroad.

The truth is that, either way, Obama will have dealt Israel a potentially mortal blow. Without control of the high ground and water aquifers of the West Bank, the Jewish state is simply indefensible and unsustainable.

Some may suggest that international forces (perhaps led by the United States) should be deployed in the areas Jews have historically known as Judea and Samaria so as to ensure that they are not used to harm Israelis in the low-lying areas to the west.

We have seen how such arrangements work in practice in Lebanon, though — which is to say not well.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Did you ever think that things in America would get so bad that we would need to put armed guards into our unemployment offices? Well, that is exactly what is happening in Indiana. Armed security guards will now be posted at all 36 full-service unemployment offices in the state of Indiana. So why is this happening now? Well, Indiana Department of Workforce Development spokesman Marc Lotter says that the agency is bringing in the extra security in anticipation of an upcoming deadline when thousands upon thousands of Indiana residents could have their unemployment benefits cut off. But it is not just the state of Indiana that could have a problem. In fact, one recent study found that approximately 2 million Americans will lose their unemployment insurance benefits during this upcoming holiday season unless Congress authorizes another emergency extension of benefits by the end of November. At this point, however, that is looking less and less likely.
So perhaps all the states will have to start putting armed security guards in their unemployment offices. The truth is that frustration among unemployed Americans is growing by the day.

Robert Shiller - one of the top housing experts in the United States - says that the mortgage fraud is a lot like the fraud which occurred during the Great Depression. As Fortune notes:

Shiller said the danger of foreclosuregate -- the scandal in which it has come to light that the biggest banks have routinely mishandled homeownership documents, putting the legality of foreclosures and related sales in doubt -- is a replay of the 1930s, when Americans lost faith that institutions such as business and government were dealing fairly.

The former chief accountant of the S.E.C., Lynn Turner, told the New York Times that fraud helped cause the Great Depression:

The amount of gimmickry and outright fraud dwarfs any period since the early 1970's, when major accounting scams like Equity Funding surfaced, and the 1920's, when rampant fraud helped cause the crash of 1929 and led to the creation of the S.E.C.

The original Pecora investigation documented the causes of the economic collapse that led to the Great Depression. It ... established that conflicts of interest and fraud were common among elite finance and government officials.

The Pecora investigations provided the factual basis that produced a consensus that the financial system and political allies were corrupt.

Moreover, the Glass Steagall Act was passed because of the fraudulent use of normal bank deposits for speculative invesments. As the Congressional Research Service notes:

In the Great Depression after 1929, Congress examined the mixing of the “commercial” and “investment” banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. Hearings revealed conflicts of interest and fraud in some banking institutions’ securities activities. A formidable barrier to the mixing of these activities was then set up by the Glass Steagall Act.

Economist James K. Galbraith wrote in the introduction to his father, John Kenneth Galbraith's, definitive study of the Great Depression, The Great Crash, 1929:

The main relevance of The Great Crash, 1929 to the great crisis of 2008 is surely here. In both cases, the government knew what it should do. Both times, it declined to do it. In the summer of 1929 a few stern words from on high, a rise in the discount rate, a tough investigation into the pyramid schemes of the day, and the house of cards on Wall Street would have tumbled before its fall destroyed the whole economy. In 2004, the FBI warned publicly of "an epidemic of mortgage fraud." But the government did nothing, and less than nothing, delivering instead low interest rates, deregulation and clear signals that laws would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. There followed every manner of scheme to fleece the unsuspecting ....

This was fraud, perpetrated in the first instance by the government on the population, and by the rich on the poor.
***
The government that permits this to happen is complicit in a vast crime.

WE'RE HIT!!! TELEVISION Live!

WE'RE HIT!!! TV LIVE ARCHIVES

WE'RE HIT!!! RADIO WEEKLY REVIEW With Mark Matheny

RT News Live Stream

Watch Now

WE'RE HIT TELEVISION

By Mark Matheny

Most Corrupt States in U.S.

From bribery and kickbacks, to embezzlement and election crime, the American politician has been involved in them all. While some states with more politicians can be expected to have more corruption, as these graphics show it is not always the case.

History of the Vatican

The Federal Reserve

Council on Foreign Relations

Trilateral Commision

Secret Societies

"We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst."J. Edgar Hoover

Bilderberg Club

Enter Here

Club of Rome

Enter Here

Skull and Bones Society

Enter Here

Illuminati

Enter Here

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste"...

"..What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

MY TUBE

Visits

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues of ecological, political, and humanitarian significance. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in recieving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Permission to reprint any articles written by authors of SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!! on this site are granted as long as credit is given to the author and any links in the article connecting to this website are also posted.